Automation Bias → Cognitive Surrender

Good morning everyone, and happy Monday.

Last night, I had the best sleep I’ve had…

well, I think ever since I started tracking my sleep.

I had a wonderful weekend with friends and family.

A lot of good things going on, but my sleep suffered.

I think many of you can relate, especially with the whole daylight savings time situation.

We lose an hour of sleep and it just kind of messes things up.

But last night I tried something new:

Typically, I charge my smartphone on the other side of the room so it’s not within reach.

But I’ve been learning a lot about how anxiety can be generated by your phone even if it’s not within reach just by knowing it’s in the same room.

So anyway, last night I tried something different.

I actually charged my phone in a separate room in our apartment not just out of immediate reach.

Now, we’ll see. I’m not sure if it was just revenge sleep from not sleeping well throughout the weekend, but I’m telling you I only woke up three times last night.

And according to my Apple Watch, which I was wearing to track my sleep, each time I was awake for only for about a minute, maybe three or four minutes in total.

In my seven hours and forty-five minutes of sleep, I also had a very healthy chunk of deep sleep.

So long story short: I recommend trying it at home.

Besides the usual advice lying down without looking at screens 45mins before sleep start (no smartphone screen, no TV screen, no iPad screen)

I typically only have my Kindle Paperwhite at arm’s reach when I’m asleep.

Sometimes if I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t immediately fall back asleep, I’ll reach for that.

But this time I moved my phone even further away, with more boundaries between me and it.

And it went well.

So anyway, I’m going to keep doing that this week and wanted to share in case you had been thinking about trying it and needed that extra push…

So what have I been thinking about this week? What is this Monday Thought about?

Well, I’ve been thinking deeply about two major and related concepts.

The first concept is automation bias.

If you know me, if you’ve worked with me, or if you’ve talked to me throughout my career, you might know that I have probably suffered from a pretty acute automation bias.

Automation bias means assigning more value or trust to data-driven, automated outcomes over human or analog outcomes, analyses, or processes.

And honestly, this bias served me well in my career for a long time.

It was proven to be pretty powerful.

Especially during the era when we were going from:

“there’s all this data being generated but we’re not capturing it, tracking it, or analyzing it”

to a world where we capture it, tag it, organize it, process it, and use it to make better decisions about our organizations.

That shift generated real outcomes: more efficiency, greater scale, better personalization.

But as my career progressed and as certain technologies like social media continued to find ways to become profitable I think many of us fell into a trap.

We kept sliding further down the slope of automation bias.

At some point, the algorithms’ weights and balances became optimized heavily for the profit of the corporations that own them.

It certainly feels like the incentives shifted.

And those incentives moved much faster than our rules and regulations, which are always playing catch-up.

That’s not necessarily bad.

In many ways it’s one of the reasons this country remains incredibly innovative in technology.

But it does create consequences.

So anyway, that’s automation bias.

The second concept, which I think is becoming even more important (and perhaps more urgent) is cognitive surrender.

Cognitive surrender.

This is a phenomenon where, as we leverage technology (particularly artificial intelligence) we begin to trust the analysis and thinking of our large language models and other AI tools more than of other humans and in particular our own.

Over time, if we lean more and more heavily on these tools to make decisions, make plans, and essentially do our thinking for us, we begin to diminish our own ability to:

 • think critically

 • think creatively

 • think independently

And as we’ve seen with other technologies, companies eventually need to return on the massive investments being made.

The investments going into AI right now are unprecedented in size, scale, and speed.

If history rhymes, companies will eventually have to find ways to monetize our cognitive surrender in order to generate returns for shareholders.

And that creates a real risk.

Number one: history repeating itself.

Number two: history repeating itself at unprecedented speed and scale.

Which could lead to the…

excuse my French…

enshittification of AI platforms and experiences.

And if that happens, the consequences are larger than just the technology itself.

Because the question isn’t just:

What happens when a large portion of society begins surrendering its cognitive abilities to machines?

The bigger question is:

What happens when those same systems start optimizing the experience that serve business incentives in ways that surrender human flourishing?

We’ve already seen a version of this with social media.

Social media became the mechanism through which many of us surrendered our attention.

Algorithms decide:

What clip we watch next.

What micro-emotion we feel next.

What thought we think next.

We surrendered large portions of our attention to these systems.

Now with AI, the risk is something deeper.

Not attention.

Cognition.

Many of us, including myself for a period of time, until I started waking up to it, may be beginning to surrender core parts of our thinking to machines.

Now, is it too late?

I don’t think so.

Can we derive enormous benefits from AI?

Curing terrible desease.

Space exploration.

Education.

Solving hunger.

Improving the human condition.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

But individually and collectively we need to figure out the right way to engage with this technology.

A way that enhances our thinking rather than replaces it.

A way that protects, and maybe even strengthens, our cognitive abilities instead of surrendering them while ushering in abundance and well being.

Delegating some repetitive tasks is fine.

But surrendering thinking entirely is something else.

Here is a NotebookLM (22min) I created while marinating on this thought:

🎧 Why Your Brain Blindly Trusts Automation 

I highly recommend giving it a listen. 

Thank you for reading my Monday Thought number 34.

As I promised: no filter.

I essentially recorded this voice note this morning, transcribed it, and cleaned it up a little bit.

But this is my original thought.

Have an amazing week.

Keep thinking.

Keep thinking for your selves.

Keep thinking for each other.

Keep thinking with each other.

👋 See you next week!

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